If you’ve spent the last few years thinking OLED burn-in was a solved problem I’ve got news for you. It’s true that OLED has fixed a lot of its problems, but RTINGS just wrapped up one of the most punishing display tests it has ever run, and the results are a little humbling if you’re confident your OLED screen wasn’t going to burn in.
Modern OLED panels are brighter, more efficient, and more color accurate. They’ll give you a better picture while consuming less power and likely at a more reasonable cost. That said, you’d still want to use all the burn-in protection you can.
441 days of CNN later, every TV still burned in
RTINGS ran the same torture test it ran in 2017
RTINGS pushed 20 OLED TVs, ranging from a 2017 LG C7 all the way up to 2023 models, through roughly 10,500 hours of simulated use at each panel’s maximum SDR brightness. That works out to about 441 straight days of continuous operation, or roughly watching TV five hours a day for a decade.
The test method was deliberately brutal: live CNN, tickers and all, running nonstop so that the same static elements sat in the same spots on the panel for thousands of hours. RTINGS wanted a direct apples-to-apples comparison with its earlier 2017 burn-in test, and it got one. Every single TV in the lineup, old and new alike, ended up with visible permanent image retention.
Twice as bright, 27% more efficient, equally vulnerable
Every efficiency gain gets spent on peak brightness
On paper, OLED technology has come a long way. RTINGS found that 2023 panels were about 28 percent brighter at a 10 percent average picture level and more than twice as bright at full-screen 100 percent APL compared with the 2017 reference set.
Efficiency gains were real too, with newer sets using around 27 percent less power to hit the same brightness targets. The 2017 C7 needed roughly 130 watts to produce 100 nits, while a 2023 panel needed only 95. Averaged out across panel sizes, RTINGS pegs the overall efficiency gain to roughly 33 percent.
What hasn’t changed however, is resistance to OLED burn-in when a panel is run at maximum brightness. RTINGS was explicit about this as well. At the 10,500 hour mark, the 2020 to 2023 generation did not show a consistent reduction in permanent image retention compared with the 2017 C7 under the same CNN torture test.
In other words, manufacturers have spent years cranking up peak brightness and organic-material efficiency, but burn-in resistance essentially remained the same. The one thing you’d actually care about when using OLED screens in daily devices like TVs, laptops, and smartphones is still the same as its worrysome past.
Brighter panels just mean harder-working diodes
The headroom is yours now, not the factory’s
Newer OLEDs are so much brighter than the older ones that when you run them at their own maximum brightness, you are asking the organic diodes inside to work harder in absolute terms, even if they are technically more efficient per nit. The brightness increases newer OLEDs enjoy are largely negated by the fact that people drive them at similarly extreme brightness levels, so any material or engineering gains get eaten up by higher peak output.
This is a bit of a paradox because while there are improvements, unless you change your usage habits, you’re not going to see them. It’s like buying a more fuel-efficient car and just driving everywhere faster than you did before.
The silver lining however is that this headroom is now in your hands rather than the manufacturer’s. If you deliberately drive a modern OLED at a brightness closer to what a 2017 panel would have needed to hit the same nits, you are almost certainly getting meaningfully better longevity as the newer panel isn’t being pushed nearly as hard to get there.
At the end, we’re still stuck with the same precautions. Bring your SDR brightness down to somewhere around 60 to 80 percent of the factory default if you watch in anything other than a brightly lit room, and your panel should last longer. There’s rarely a picture-quality reason to run at max brightness in the first place, so unless the environment requires it, you’re better off not pushing your OLED panel.
Your OLED is fine, unless it’s doing this one thing
Static UI elements are still the real risk
Keep in mind that RTINGS ran these tests for up to 18 to 20 hours a day showing the same static news ticker at full brightness, which is about as close to a worst-case scenario as you can make in a lab. It’s also likely not how you’d be using your OLED panel in daily life.
Under normal, varied viewing, mixing movies, games, and streaming with a brightness setting well under maximum, burn-in remains a low-probability event for the vast majority of owners, and RTINGS’ own prior real-life testing backs that up. But if you’re using your OLED as a display for your computer where UI elements always sit in the same spot, or if you leave a HUD on screen for hours, the burn-in risk is still very much present. OLED’s oldest weakness was never actually fixed, it was just hidden between numbers that were bigger, and made for better marketing copy.